This series of posts presents ten simple suggestions to help you change your units or parts of your units to develop students’ research skills and competencies that you can adapt to suit your particular context.

10 easy ways

1. Change an assessment to an inquiry
2. Change a laboratory class to guided discovery
3. Engage students in gathering or working with data
4. Turn your unit of study into a conference
5. Arrange for students to interview researchers
6. Invite students and staff to research speed-dating
7. Get students to write an abstract
8. Change essays into academic articles
9. Turn the class into a hypothesis-generating forum
10. Create a competition

6.   Invite students and staff to research speed-dating

With the support of the whole department, you can extend the idea of student interviews, so that all can participate in a sort of ‘speed-dating’ lunch. To ensure that students get the most out of the experience, you could ask them to focus on particular questions, or you could focus the event around, for example, future research developments. There are endless possibilities.

Depending on the venue and the numbers of students and staff, the students could rotate around the tables or the students could stay put and the staff could rotate around.

Example

“All students in the cohort are invited to lunch with all academics in the department. Students get their lunch and sit down in groups of two or three. Academics join their table one at a time and students ask the academic a series of questions about their research. A bell rings and the academics rotate around the groups.” (University of Queensland)